Adam Dickter - Staff Writer

Hoping for a boost from the city’s religious communities in a campaign that has lacked defining issues, two Democratic candidates for mayor are positioning themselves as supporters of social services linked to faith-based groups.

The city would appoint a “nonprofit czar,” find housing for large, religious families, work to keep Catholic schools open and devote more police to protecting yeshivas if Rep. Anthony Weiner were elected, he announced last week at NYU’s Hillel house.

“Democrats must reclaim our partnership with faith,” Weiner said, echoing a theme national Democrats have adopted since the November election and its moral values overtones.

A few days later, Council Speaker Gifford Miller surrounded himself with Jewish social-services leaders at a kosher food pantry in Borough Park to highlight the nearly $12 million allocated in the June 30 budget for the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty and its affiliated community councils.

The event apparently was intended to show that Miller already had experience doing what Weiner was proposing.

“Gifford Miller has been a leader for the past 3½ years in partnering with religious groups to provide services,” said his Jewish liaison, Manny Behar, after the event.

A campaign spokesman for Michael Bloomberg said later that no one trumps the mayor in helping the faithful help the needy.

“Mike Bloomberg has already opened dozens of new partnerships with faith-based groups,” said Stu Loeser, promising “many, many more in the second term.”

Weiner’s event, however, was intended to portray him as much as a friend of the faith-based community as an iconoclast within his own party, which steadfastly has opposed President Bush’s initiatives to fund groups with religious missions to carry out vital social services. Nationally, Democrats have struggled to adopt language that appeals to faith while drawing the line at government funding.

“We can’t be a party that walks way from organizations of faith, because they are practicing some of the things we believe very strongly,” Weiner said Tuesday.

Miller has also been courting religious communities by pushing through legislation to eliminate parking meters on Sundays to make it easier for churchgoers, setting up a battle with Bloomberg, who says the city can’t afford the lost quarters. The mayor’s veto pen is ready, but an override is likely.

Drawing a few amens from communities of faith could help Weiner and Miller — both of whom have been lagging in Democratic primary polls behind frontrunner Fernando Ferrer — break from the pack.

“When the topic is affordable housing, they all want more,” said Democratic consultant Norman Adler, who is not involved in the mayoral race. “When the topic is subways, they all want them safer. Nobody differs on any of that stuff. But communities are saying what about other issues, and these appeals are directed at them.”

As to whether the religion card is effective, Adler said, “It’s never been tested whether that sort of thing plays in New York City. Jews especially have a wariness about government getting involved with religion because it usually works out against us.”

Many national Jewish groups have opposed federal faith-based initiatives because of concerns about opening the door to public funding of religious activity.

But Weiner’s local proposal prompted no immediate constitutional unease.

“There is nothing new or novel about a proposal to enhance security for nonprofits,” said Marc Stern of the American Jewish Congress, a watchdog on issues of church and state. “And a lot of the city money is federal money, bound by rules. Some of it sounds problematic in the sense that it singles out certain types of institutions for particular types of benefits, but I wouldn’t get bent out of shape about it, as long as he is not singling out places of worship in the contracting scheme.”

While generally praising Weiner’s proposals, David Zwiebel of Agudath Israel of America said his umbrella group would be wary because of efforts on the federal level to ensure that organizations who partner with the government eschew hiring practices based on religion or sexual orientation. He noted that his organization already sued the Koch administration in the 1980s over such provisions.

“A partnership can only work if a religious organization is allowed to stand on its practices and values,” he said.

Weiner opposed a faith-based measure in the House because it did not bar religious or sexual discrimination by contracted groups, and said as mayor he would not allow agencies that discriminate to participate in faith-based funding.